This is how I see it. Incidentally, stuff like trying to move from 37.5 -> 40h / week is probably one of the most stupid thing a company could do, assuming you have a culture where working time is seen as a social agreement rather than a strict contract. Once you are haggling over 2.5 hours, you open the door to haggling both ways, and the social agreement is at risk of collapsing. It's cool that you managed to break out of it, because (in my experience at least) one of the hardest things there is is to bring that back in once it has temporarily collapsed.